Therapeutic Revolutions

"Martin Halliwell offers fresh and inventive insights into the postwar period, showing mastery over an amazing range of material to demonstrate how fully the therapeutic triumphed in American culture."

- Stephen Whitfield (author of The Culture of the Cold War) "Following varied terms of health and illness, mind and body, through successive changes in the healing arts, Halliwell shows the postwar 'triumph of the therapeutic' in a wholly new light."

- Howard Brick (Louis Evans Professor of History University of Michigan)

"Therapeutic Revolutions makes a very good read. It should be on the reading list of every scholar concerned with postwar America, especially with the nature of therapeutic culture."

(Reviews in American History)

"Martin Halliwell’s Therapeutic Revolutions traces the major post-World War II transformations in medicine and psychiatry through the lens of popular culture. To accomplish this ambitious goal, he uses an immense number of sources that include movies, novels, poetry, television shows, popular music, magazine stories, and government and foundation reports, as well as scholarly books, articles, ethnographies, and Ph.D. theses ... The strengths of this book stem from Halliwell’s comprehensive analysis of an astonishing array of diffuse material."

(Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences)

"When it comes to changes and culture, Halliwell knows his subject area. Throughout the book, he reveals his deep and thorough understanding of these diverse events as they evolved in the developing 'therapeutic revolutions.' He does so through a careful analysis of the writings of the period's therapeutic authorities, integrated with abundant examples from American popular culture. Throughout the book, Halliwell convincingly shows that the variables-events, popular culture, and postwar therapies-emerged as interdependent constructions."

(H-Disability, H-Net Reviews)